For three years, Young Rewired State has been showing young people the joys of coding using open government data such as crime figures and weather data. This year, Newcastle got involved for the first time. JOHN HILL finds out more about how everyone got on, and how the project may help raise interest in a valued skill.
THERE’S a huge, exciting toybox of public data sitting out there, unlocked, waiting for someone to rummage through it. But who’s going to roll up their sleeves and do it?
Sure, there’s a group of twenty-and-thirtysomethings who’ve spent hours building websites, applications and businesses out of technology that’s emerged during their own lifetimes. But what do you get when the next generation get stuck in as well?
How about the Moodmap, a program which picks out location-tagged tweets, feeds them through code that analyses their mood, and plots the data on top of a map marking out areas of deprivation?
Or UniMatch, a project which works out which university is most suitable for a future student, based on data such as distance, fees, night life and UCAS points?
Maybe PacMap, which allows you to play the classic arcade game on a satellite map of your neighbourhood? Or Space Data, which uses xml spreadsheets from Government websites to find an alien a new home based on the happiness of people in a given county?
These are a few of the results from a week of work by under-18s involved in Young Rewired State, a nationwide initiative that aims to get young people more interested in coding by encouraging them how to get hold of open data – such as crime figures, consumption statistics and hygiene ratings – and use it in a new and exciting way.
The project was set up in London by “hack day” organiser Rewired State three years ago as a spin-off from an event called Hack the Government Day.
This year’s YRS event ran in 14 centres across the UK last week, including one at Newcastle’s Centre for Life. Participants then travelled to London to present their ideas to a panel including representatives from Number 10, Google and TechCrunch Europe.
Programmer Oli Wood, who was a mentor for the Newcastle group for the week, says: “I grew up knowing I could pry the back off something and tinker with it. Now technology is this shiny box, and people aren’t encouraged to take the back off, either metaphorically or physically.
“Telling people about open data and getting them involved with Young Rewired State can shift people’s mentality so that they know it’s okay to tinker. Programming can be hard, but it’s not that hard.”
Wood had been involved with other Rewired State projects, and decided to help get a Newcastle YRS event going this year.
